I appreciate the concept of Crave: Recipes Arranged by Flavour to Suit Your Mood in organizing itself by flavor combination profiles like “fresh and fragrant”, “tart and sour”, chilli and heat”, “spiced and curried”, “rich and savoury”, and “cheesy and creamy”. I like the focus on the idea that not all comfort food is mac and cheese; nothing against that, but sometimes you just want something like “honeyed halloumi with apricot fregola” or “orange blossom melon with frozen raspberries”. I also appreciate that in spite of the beyond chef-y nature of most of the recipes, the ingredient lists are not unapproachable at all.
I do wonder though why ‘sweet’ doesn’t get its own category in some form. While most sections do include a sweet option or two, the classification gets strained when you use peanut butter as the only qualifier for “rich and savory” sweet recipes. Peanuts can do savory, but savory is to me and I think most people nearly the opposite of sweet, and peanuts are perfectly capable of that too. Just because the bread pudding has peanut butter and bitter chocolate or what is called a parfait is peanut butter focused does not automatically make something worthy of savory, and I do not buy the author’s explanation of “There is sweetness here, but the overriding sensation is of deeply savoury and occasionally salty peanut butter”. This example of the parfait actually also represents my main complaints about this book and why it’s going back to the library without me trying anything in it. A parfait to most normal people is not essentially a frozen panna cotta with nuts and fruit on top, it’s a layered dessert that might include custard or whipped cream in the layers, but there’s usually more than 1 ½. This is the chefy-y part; it’s almost like the author, a former lawyer gone culinary school grad, is trying to show off how culinarily cool he is. Technically he’s right; his recipe is a parfait according to the definition in The Concise Larousse Gastronomique (yes I looked that up, and yes I do happen to own this reference book), but he seems to be trying to aim at a reader who is a home cook with some aspirations which means he really should either explain the technical vocabulary or else re-label the recipe.
Remember how I mentioned the ingredient lists aren’t too bad? They aren’t but if you look carefully there’s a lot of hidden little comments like “full-fat soft cream cheese (without additives or stabilizers- check the ingredients)” {cited from the recipe “Honeyed Basque Cheesecake”}. This gives off a pretentious vibe that to me borders on chef-y smugness, and unless you live in an area with lots of specialty markets, finding something like that is going to be hard.
Finally, if I actually crave something, I’m not going to spend half a day trying to make something. By definition, craving usually means that you want the thing within a fairly short amount of time. While this might be possible for some of the recipes, the majority would probably take at least an hour if not several. There are no indications of time required except if you read the recipe all the way through; again, this suggests pretentiousness that annoys me. No, I do not have all day to spend fixing what will amount to a little snack tray, and no I am not especially willing to read the recipe very closely just to figure out how long this will take me. If other cookbooks can make a predictive note about that near the beginning, you could have too.